Computer-aided techniques are known to include Computer-Aided Design or CAD, which relates to software solutions for authoring product design. Similarly, CAE is an acronym for Computer-Aided Engineering, e.g. it relates to software solutions for simulating the physical behavior of a future product. CAM stands for Computer-Aided Manufacturing and typically includes software solutions for defining manufacturing processes and operations.
A number of systems and programs are offered on the market for the design of objects (or parts) or assemblies of objects, forming a product, such as the one provided by Dassault Systèmes under the trademark CATIA. These CAD systems allow a user to construct and manipulate complex three dimensional or 3D models of objects or assemblies of objects. CAD systems thus provide a representation of modeled objects using edges or lines, in certain cases with faces. Lines or edges may be represented in various manners, e.g. non-uniform rational B-splines (NURBS). These CAD systems manage parts or assemblies of parts as modeled objects, which are mostly specifications of geometry. Specifically, CAD files contain specifications, from which geometry is generated, which in turn allow for a representation to be generated. Geometry and representation may be stored in a single CAD file or multiple ones. CAD systems include graphic tools for representing the modeled objects to the designers; these tools are dedicated to the display of complex objects; the typical size of a file representing an object in a CAD system being in the range of one Megabyte per part, and an assembly may comprise thousands of parts. A CAD system manages models of objects, which are stored in electronic files.
The current process facility asset (i.e., plants, production facilities, refineries, etc.) is complex and continuously changing due to plant modifications. Often, since the plant is very large, the minor modification are done in lower cost 2D CAD which is not compatible with the 3D CAD application that was used to originally design the plant or in a different 3D CAD application from the originating 3D CAD application type. After many changes to the facility, the originating 3D CAD model is rendered obsolete. As a result, for major modifications and expansions, companies are forced to have a laser scan of the facility to get an as-is view of the plant. The laser scan however is not a CAD application and additional services and costs are required to re-engineer the areas of interest to convert the laser scan format (i.e. point clouds) to a 3D CAD format.
Current technologies involve a lot of manual conversions combined with a catalog of existing 3D model (or image) parts that can be brought into the laser scan.